Showing papers by "Miguel Castro published in 2015"

No compromises: distributed transactions with consistency, availability, and performance

Abstract: Transactions with strong consistency and high availability simplify building and reasoning about distributed systems. However, previous implementations performed poorly. This forced system designers to avoid transactions completely, to weaken consistency guarantees, or to provide single-machine transactions that require programmers to partition their data. In this paper, we show that there is no need to compromise in modern data centers. We show that a main memory distributed computing platform called FaRM can provide distributed transactions with strict serializability, high performance, durability, and high availability. FaRM achieves a peak throughput of 140 million TATP transactions per second on 90 machines with a 4.9 TB database, and it recovers from a failure in less than 50 ms. Key to achieving these results was the design of new transaction, replication, and recovery protocols from first principles to leverage commodity networks with RDMA and a new, inexpensive approach to providing non-volatile DRAM.

Recovery in data centers

Abstract: A server at a cluster of servers in a data center is described. The server comprises a memory which is part of a distributed memory of the cluster. The server has at least one processor executing transactions and lock-free reads on software objects stored in regions of the distributed memory, the software objects and details of the transactions being replicated in the distributed memory. The server has a network interface card arranged to receive a message indicating a new configuration of the cluster comprising addition, removal or potential failure of at least one of the other servers. The processor is configured to use a recovery process which enables the lock-free reads and committed ones of the transactions to retain the properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability across configuration changes.